


The Consequence of Failure

by enjolrolo



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Gen, Panic Attacks, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 04:53:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4250043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enjolrolo/pseuds/enjolrolo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Bucky was being brainwashed by HYDRA, there were a series of implanted commands that HYDRA used to control him.</p><p>And, unfortunately, they're less than easy to forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Consequence of Failure

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [this](http://ihavetwobuckystomyname.tumblr.com/post/120448735853/i-swear-if-this-happens-in-civil-war-i-will/) post.

It had been about a year since Bucky had showed up in Avengers tower in the middle of the night with blue lips and soaked-through clothes. That night, he’d sat down in one of the common rooms, silently shivering and hoping for morning to come, which had nearly startled Bruce to death when the doctor went to get a late-night cup of coffee.

A year later, Bucky wasn’t doing nearly as well as he had been before he was drafted. It had been almost a hundred years since he’d opened that letter, stuffed it in his pocket and refused to tell Steve. Some of the hurt would ever heal entirely. He'd hoped, when he'd first showed up, that he'd eventually return to normal, but he was starting to suspect that he was going to have to accept that his life was going to be like this forever.

Sam had been working with both Bucky and Steve every few weeks or so, trying to get some things sorted out so that they could sleep through the night. It was emotionally taxing on him, especially as they became better and better friends, so he couldn't do sessions that often, but Bucky appreciated the time he put in. It was strange to talk to anyone about waht happened to him, though Bucky got the feeling sometimes that he was a little too blasé about some topics. After he casually recounted a time he'd been waterboarded for Soviet information in 1953 and Sam had broken the pencil he was using with how much tension had built up in his hand, Bucky figured maybe he had a different tolerance level for violence towards himself than the others did. 

Some missions were a little more difficult to talk about, but not for emotional reasons. Bucky suspected that HYDRA had programmed him to forget most of the details, and when they couldn't do that, they placed commands that would stop him from telling the truth about them. No matter how much Bucky tried, an different answer would roll off his tongue, and then he would give up answering altogether.

One session, after fifteen minutes of Sam asking him why he was lying to him, Bucky yelled in frustration and kicked a chair. Sam, being a fantastic therapist, realized what was happening and was able to focus on re-training Bucky to tell the truth.

Someone did some kind of illegal activity--probably Natalia, if Bucky had to guess--and found a HYDRA record of Bucky’s implanted commands. It was incomplete and hadn’t been updated in fifty years, but Bucky couldn't get the words to come out of his mouth to correct anyone. His reconditioning sessions were the one subject he couldn't talk about, and he didn't think he could ever get up the courage to directly tell someone what his command words were. He knew that the issue would rear its head eventually, but he thought maybe he could cross that bridge when he came to it.

The first issue that came up was that when anyone on the team got hurt enough to stay in the hospital ward, Bucky would sit at their bedside with a knife in his hand until the injured teammate could leave the hospital. Bucky told everyone that he did it just to make sure that everyone was safe, but in reality, his mind shut down when he saw someone fall out in the field, and he didn’t remember anything except blurry white smudges until the patient was well. It was terrifying, and Bucky didn’t know how to stop it, and he didn't know how his brain had latched onto these new friends as people he was required to protect.

He could sit for three days, or five, or however long the hurt person needed. His body had been trained over seventy years to ignore signs of fatigue or hunger or thirst, so he just sat motionless and generally scared everyone working at the hospital. When he left, he was lightheaded and exhausted, but the instinct to protect was too strong for him to do anything about. 

Despite this unfortunate side effect, he kept going out to fight with them. It was good practice, even if his newfound autonomy meant the trauma of his time as the Soldier was beginning to catch up with him--the sound of gunfire making him flinch, the frequent bouts of dissociation that weirded some of the Avengers out in a major way.

Then came one of the standard alien invasions--weird, misshapen creatures with a lot of weapons and a strange-looking mother ship.

Natalia, Tony, Sam, and Clint kept up most of the conversation on the comms, so Bucky focused on just punching every creature that looked mean. It became a little bit of a routine after a while, punch-stab-kick-stab, punch-stab-kick-stab, punchstabkickstab. Once, an alien took him by surprise and slashed a huge blade down Bucky’s side, but it wasn’t bad enough for Bucky to have an excuse to stop fighting.

That was when Bucky heard a strangled yell over the comms and a frantic “Barton! Status!” from Sam.

When no status came, Bucky ran for the building he’d last seen Barton, saying, "I'll check on him." The rest of the team could probably handle the aliens, they were almost done.

Bucky ran up six flights of a fire escape before finally bursting onto the roof and finding Clint kneeling next to a large, dead alien. When he heard Bucky, Clint raised his head a little and then promptly fell sideways, allowing Bucky to finally catch sight of the wound on the back of Clint’s head.

There was a moment of ringing in his ears, and Bucky took a step forward, and then his mind went blank, like he’d lost control again.

Blurs passed in front of Bucky’s eyes, but he could never focus his vision. He felt like he was trapped in his own mind, shouting and shouting but not ever making a sound. With no way of telling how much time had passed, the part of his mind that was still Bucky started to get more and more scared. As more time passed, Bucky started to convince himself that this was the instance he would resurface from.

As if from a far distance, Bucky felt a sharp stab of pain. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from, so instead it surrounded him, covering him in a thick blanket of agony. The pain didn’t subside, and instead increased, but as this happened, Bucky felt a different sort of pressure somewhere else. His shoulder. He was being shaken.

Bucky started, his eyes suddenly focused, and he found himself sitting next to a hospital bed with Barton lying in it, asleep. Natalia was the one shaking him and--okay, Bucky was actually in a lot of pain. He doubled over, gasping, and Natalia hauled him to his feet without a word, presumably leading Bucky to a nurse.

“How long...was that?” Bucky got out. He felt dizzy, but wouldn’t give in to unconsciousness again. There was dried blood coating the side of his uniform, which he noticed when he bent over to dry-heave.

“Seventeen hours,” Natalia answered with an impassive expression on her face, singlehandedly keeping Bucky on his feet. “The scratch in your side was pretty bad, Steve was worried you were going to bleed out.”

“Is Barton…”

“He’ll be fine in a few weeks. Punctured lung and some stitches.”

“Am I still allowed to go out on call?”

“Absolutely _not_.” Natalia turned Bucky over to a nurse. Bucky was still in full battle gear and clutching a knife, which probably explained why the nurse looked vaguely petrified.

She conspicuously took the knife, then stared Bucky down. “We’ll discuss this later.”

Bucky knew he didn't have much choice in the matter.

 

Another issue was Bucky’s ingrained fear of failure. Whenever Bucky dropped a glass, accidentally bumped into Thor in the hallway, or forgot what he was supposed to buy while he was at the grocery store, memories of getting forced into a chair and feeling his mind be torn apart suddenly resurfaced, and he could only retreat into a corner and get ready to fight, or run away from the situation.

There was one morning when Sam was sick with the flu, and he grunted at Bucky as the latter passed by Sam’s room. Bucky was feeling a little bit of flu too, but it wasn’t that bad for him. He suspected his immune system was a little better than the average Joe's because of whatever version of the serum Zola had given to him, but he'd never gotten it checked out.

Bucky turned and stood a respectful distance from Sam’s door. “You don’t look too hot.”

“That’s rude,” Sam mumbled, his stuffy nose blocking the majority of his voice.

“You’re barely a four right now.”

Sam sat up halfway, pointing at him threateningly. “You take that back!”

"To be fair, healthy you is a seven at most."

"Screw you, Barnes," Sam groaned, "You're a five on a good day."

Bucky smiled and shook his head. “What do you need?”

“Toast would be nice,” Sam murmured, and then fell back onto his pillows dramatically, still looking somewhat offended.

Bucky arrived in the empty kitchen a few minutes later. The bread was found successfully, and the toaster was by far the easiest thing to operate in the kitchen. While Bucky was waiting for the toast to pop up, he sat on the counter quietly.

The sound of the toast popping up startled him, like it always did, but he just stepped over and removed the bread, found some jam to go on top, and then he finally put the food on a plate. 

As he was leaving the kitchen, he ran straight into Steve, which knocked the plate from his hands and sent it tumbling to the floor to shatter, and Bucky went into crisis mode.

He threw up his hands to shield his face, and backed up until he hit the counter. There were three exits, two windows to his left that led to a two hundred foot drop, the door to the common room, and the door behind Steve. If he needed them, there were knives on the counter, and maybe some hot water left in the kettle--

Bucky felt a hand touch his arm, and he shut his eyes and flinched so hard that his left arm hit the cupboards with a clank. There was some other noise happening, like some sort of hum, but Bucky couldn’t understand what it was outside of the sound of his heart pounding in his ears. All Bucky could think of was being cornered by Pierce, being tied to that chair, having machines send electricity through his head until he fell unconscious. That was the consequence of messing up, and he was going to have to go through it again.

The hand on Bucky’s bare arm was back, and the touch of it was surprisingly gentle.

 _It’s a trap_ , screamed the Winter Soldier. _It’s a trap get to an exit get out of here--_

Then, Bucky heard his name, and it wasn’t like Zola’s at all. His heart skipped a beat when he heard not the cold “James Buchanan Barnes,” but a pleading “ _Bucky_.”

Bucky forced his eyes open, and saw Steve crouching in front of him, one hand placed on Bucky’s arm. Steve was speaking slowly, most likely because Bucky was having a hard time comprehending anything at the moment. “You’re in Avengers Tower, you’re safe, nobody here is going to hurt you.”

“I b-roke the plate, aren’t you mad? Is Howard--Tony-- _Stark_ , is he gonna be mad?” Bucky gulped for air, but his lungs weren’t big enough.

“I’m not mad, and he won’t be mad, Thor breaks plates all the time.”

Before Bucky could decide against it, he moved forward and wrapped his arms around Steve as tight as he could. “Sam’s sick, I was supposed t’ get him food but I couldn’ do it.”

His Brooklyn accent was starting to come back slowly, and the dim, hardly-there memory of Bucky hugging Steve in their apartment almost a century ago only made this worse. Steve wouldn’t have to deal with Bucky if Bucky had talked Steve out of enlisting. Almost a century of Steve picking up Bucky's messes. The Rogers tradition.

Steve softly rubbed one hand in a circle on Bucky’s back. “Sam probably fell asleep again anyway.”

As Bucky recovered from his episode, he got more and more embarrassed about it, and felt even worse when Steve told Sam about it later. Bucky could handle this on his own, and really didn’t want Sam to worry about him any more than Sam said he did. And Natalia--Natasha? Steve called her Natasha--seemed to understand what Bucky was going through, but Bucky didn’t want to trigger anything for her, especially with HYDRA commands being weirdly specific words and phrases that could set both of them off. 

    

Over time, Bucky started sleeping better, and also started feeling bad for wasting so much of Sam’s time. Sam had spent months working through most of Bucky’s list, and Bucky was allowed out on call again, but the list was incomplete and didn’t include one behavior that could be big trouble.

 _It was unlikely to ever come up_ , Bucky told himself over and over, after Sam asked Bucky if there was anything else to warn the others about and Bucky gave a reflexive, “No”.

Tony insisted on a team game night every week, and he also enthusiastically forced Bucky to participate. That particular week, they were playing Trivial Pursuit, because Clint had loudly proclaimed that he was better at trivia than everyone else--a statement backed by little to no actual evidence, but one that got everyone competitive enough to sit down and play.

Bucky was actually laughing at Clint’s awful justifications for wrong answers, and Steve doubling over in laughter because the two of them were on a team together and still losing to everyone else. It was the best night that Bucky had had in weeks, full of good food and listening to Steve laugh next to him. He was comfy on the couch next to Thor, who was weirdly into movie trivia and kept giving Bucky correct answers. For once, he wasn’t worried that nightmares were going to hit when he fell asleep.

Then, he heard the question that Clint rattled off to Tony. “What was the first artificial satellite in Earth’s orbit?”

Bucky’s cheerful mood vanished instantly, and he looked to Steve in terror, but Steve wasn’t watching him. Steve was watching Tony, who had puffed up in pride as his knowledge of astronomy actually came to good use. It was too late for Bucky to get out of hearing range, and unless he punched Tony in the throat and undid months of trust-building, there was no action to be taken.

Tony cheerfully uttered the word that Bucky had avoided like the Plague thus far. “That’s easy! Sputnik One.”

Black wiped over Bucky’s mind, and he was out just like that.

The next thing he knew, he was bolting up into a sitting position and breathing so fast that his vision began to blur at the edges.

He was on a couch, alone, in the dark, and he was cold.

He’d had dreams while in cryo, before, and the cold only further convinced him that that was what was happening. Tony had said Sputnik to knock him out, and now Bucky was frozen for who knew how long. What had he done wrong? He must have said something, the team must have orchestrated a moment to catch him off-guard and get him out of the way.

Bucky sat there, petrified with fear, and couldn’t stop his breathing from speeding up. He was going to pass out again, and wake up twenty years later, and that _couldn’t happen_. Finally, he gasped out a desperate, “JARVIS.”

There was no way that this would do anything to help, especially if this was just a dream, but, miracle of miracles, he heard a calm voice say, “You’re in Stark Tower, your friends didn’t want to wake you up, you’ve been asleep for four hours after you went unconscious at an alarmingly fast pace. I assure you that you are safe. Who do you wish to call?”

Dream-JARVIS sounded almost realistic, and Bucky was shivering and hyperventilating and figured it couldn’t hurt. “Steve,” he whispered, and hoped that the AI could hear him. “Steve, Steve....Steve, _please_.”

His fingers were tingling, he couldn’t stop saying Steve’s name, and his lungs burned. Bucky cursed himself for being too useless to even calm himself down properly--no wonder Natalia didn’t want him out on the field. No wonder the team had figured out how to put him out of commission for a while.

Footsteps pounded down the hallway, and suddenly Steve was there on the couch across from Bucky, taking both of Bucky’s hands gently in his own. “Buck, you’re safe, it’s me.”

Steve’s hands were warm. The dreams he’d had during cryo never contained any form of warmth.

Bucky clutched Steve’s hands as tight as he could without hurting Steve. “I thought,” he hiccuped, “it was so-o c-cold, an’ I thought--”

Steve's face was set in a deep, concerned frown. “I will never let that happen to you again.”

“They always used that word t’ knock me out when they wanted t’ get me outta the way.” Bucky stared at his mismatched hands, holding onto Steve's for dear life. He was still shivering, but his breathing was slowing down, at least.

“Which word?” Steve asked.

Bucky gave a hesitant “Uh--the satellite. The Russian one. I didn’ think it would come up, so I didn’t tell Sam’r anyone.”

Carefully, Steve moved so that he could wrap an arm around Bucky, moving slowly like Bucky was a startled animal. “Have you talked to Natasha about getting past this?”

“Natalia-Natasha- _she_ doesn’ need anythin’ else on her plate and I’m doin’ fine on my own,” Bucky said, scowling.

Steve sighed. “Okay.”

“I _am_.” Bucky insisted, wiping his eyes stubbornly.

Bucky fully expected Steve to give a short hug, stand up, and go back to bed, but Steve just kept holding on. Against all of Bucky’s training, he fully relaxed and shut out any thoughts that told him to stay alert, not to trust Steve, to get out of the room as quickly as he could. Steve was safe, and Bucky was too, for the moment.

 

 


End file.
